American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Something of a lull followed. “There is rejoicing over the land; the bone of contention is removed; disunion, fanaticism, violence, insurrection are defeated,” Philip Hone wrote in his diary. “The lovers of peace, the friends of the Union” had sacrificed sectional prejudices and prevailed. The presidential election of 1852 had little of the excitement and conflict of 1848. The Democrats nominated a party wheelhorse, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, the Whigs another general, sixty-six-year-old Winfield Scott. Both parties supported the Compromise of 1850 and opposed any further agitation of the fugitive-slave question. After a campaign in which neither candidate spoke out on controversial issues, Pierce won the election, carrying all but four states.

  California cast four electoral votes for Pierce in 1852, a reminder that the United States now truly did span the continent. Californians celebrated their entry into the Union with cannonades. Those who hoped that order would follow statehood were cruelly disappointed. In California, liberty often came to mean license for the strong and unscrupulous to seize property or pleasure. The individual, reckless and self-confident, was supreme—until he was murdered, as were 4,200 whites and uncounted numbers of Indians during the 1850s.

  John Sutter watched, helpless, as prospectors stripped his wheat fields for feed for their horses, thieves butchered and sold $60,000 worth of his cattle, and business agents swindled him out of vast sums. Finally, one summer evening, fire struck the Sacramento office that held his land grants and deeds. A fire bell in the night mocked Sutter’s reliance on law.

  Bitter debate in Washington; reckless individualism in California—would the flame burning in New England, kindled by a group of vigorous thinkers and writers, add to the heat of these other fires? Or would it light the way to a deeper understanding of the benefits—and the burdens—of liberty?

  CHAPTER 14

  The Culture of Liberty

  “THERE WAS NOT A book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought” in Massachusetts from 1790 to 1830, Emerson noted with poetic license. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, however, a potent alchemy of human forces transmuted the flinty soil of New England thought into a seedbed for intellectual and artistic growth. New England, after undergoing the struggles first of a military revolution and then of an industrial one, seemed to be heeding John Adams’ admonition to himself: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy…geography, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” At its height in the early 1850s the flowering of New England would bring forth Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Thoreau’s Walden, and other notable works.

  Only a convergence of powerful forces could produce such a transformation. One was economic. The same mercantile and industrial development that had turned people’s minds toward the shipyard and the counting-house had fostered a more diversified economy that in turn encouraged a more diversified culture, with room at its joints and in its interstices for dissent and experimentation. In particular, the ample fortunes of New England philanthropists, prodded by Puritan duty, made possible the founding of libraries, the patronage of artists, the endowment of academic chairs, the higher education of sons—and occasionally daughters—in painting, poetry, music, and other lively arts.

  The maturing New England mind was seasoned and sharpened by conflict. Boston Federalists and their Whig descendants had thundered against the Jeffersons and Jacksons, the Van Burens and Polks, but the fiercest disputes arose over religious doctrine. Congregationalist Calvinism had long been wracked with disputes between conservative belief in literal scriptural and ecclesiastical authority, in the divinity of Jesus, in the depravity of man, and in revelation, as against an ethical-humanitarian Christianity that stressed the potential of individual reason as a guide to truth, the unity rather than the trinity of God, the individual as a source of reason and conscience, and the possibilities of the regeneration and even the perfectibility of man. For Bostonians this dispute had come to a head over a professorial appointment to the Hollis Chair of Divinity at Harvard in 1805. A pitched battle for support among the Harvard overseers had produced a narrow victory for the liberals and the appointment to the Harvard Divinity School of a string of Unitarian professors of theology. Outvoted, the conservative ministers seceded from Harvard and founded the Andover Theological Seminary, which proceeded to conduct genteel battle with the divinity school. Eloquent theologians reached far beyond their congregations to arouse students, businessmen, writers, and lawyers to higher doctrinal and political consciousness.

  But affluence and conflict alone could not account for the flowering of the New England mind; rather they might have degraded or fractured it, save for one other decisive factor—the rise of an intellectual base, an institutional school that supported a system of collective intellectual and artistic leadership. This is what distinguished the collectivity of literary genius in the 1840s from the individual geniuses earlier in the century.

  In that early period Washington Irving, growing up in New York City, found no literary companionship that might have lifted him above the level of his witty but superficial writing. Only in England and on the Continent, in Sir Walter Scott and lesser lights, did he find intellectual collegiality. After years abroad, he returned home a literary hero, but as Vernon Parrington wrote, he had “gently detached himself from contemporary America, and detached he remained to the end of a loitering life.” Nor had James Fenimore Cooper found in New York a milieu that drew on his highest intellectual and artistic powers. Born of a rich, manorial family in rural New Jersey, Cooper moved from Mamaroneck to Cooperstown to Scarsdale and then to New York. In 1826, after four years in New York, he left with his family to travel and write in Europe. Later he returned, alienated from his compatriots, to conduct a long running war with his critics and detractors. Affronted by the frontier squalor of America, its bumptious manners, vulgar egalitarianism, debased press and politics, he lived out his days, intellectually and politically isolated, in Cooperstown. William Cullen Bryant was another intellectual semi-isolate. Reared in a small country town in the western Massachusetts mountain land, he had a year’s education at Williams—then a college of four faculty members and a lean curriculum—before family penury forced him to give up higher education. In his early twenties he wrote a much-heralded poem—Thanatopsis—and, moving to New York, he soon emerged as the nation’s leading poet of nature. Still, his poetic range was narrow and his poetic creativity limited, essentially of a “self-pollenizing nature,” in Parrington’s words.

  Boston and Cambridge, on the other hand, provided a luxuriant bower for its creative men and women—a shelter against the hostile world, a place for mutual artistic communication, criticism, and stimulation, an array of support services. Boston was full of works by the architect Charles Bulfinch, who had built the first theater before the turn of the century, the elegant State House with its portico and dome, and the Athenaeum housing a superb private library. Boston had the Handel and Haydn Society, the Anthology Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, a host of literary clubs, the magisterial North American Review.

  Cambridge had Harvard and all that went with it. Many of the rising young literary figures had rubbed shoulders and crossed forensic swords in classes in the Yard. Cambridge was still a sedate country town where, it was said, on a quiet day one could hear the booming of guns from the Boston navy yard and the waves breaking on the ocean beaches a few miles away. Cambridge even had a small port on the Charles, where sloops deposited produce from the hinterland for Harvard tables and logs from the coast of Maine for Harvard fireplaces. Harvard had historians, moral philosophers, theologians, classicists. Above all it had great teachers who were intellectual leaders, acting as prods and mentors to a rising generation of literary geniuses.

  The most colorful of these teachers was George Ticknor. The son of a weal
thy Boston merchant who was himself a man of letters, the young Dartmouth graduate had toured the mideastern states and even visited Jefferson, and then in 1815—armed with letters of introduction from the sage of Monticello and accompanied by his friend Edward Everett—he left for Europe. There he met Byron, Chateaubriand, Goethe, Scott, Wordsworth, and a dozen other literary luminaries; he studied foreign languages assiduously. Appointed in absentia as the Smith Professor of Belles-Lettres at Harvard, he persuaded the college, on his return, to establish a program of modern languages and literature. At his stately Boston home overlooking the Common from Beacon Hill, Ticknor received students—including the daughters of his friends—in his huge library entered through a marble hall by a marble stairway. He displayed his literary opinions and his vast knowledge of the intellectual resources of Europe, and gave advice to aspiring students. Of equal stature to Ticknor was his traveling companion Edward Everett, who had been appointed to a Harvard chair of Greek literature even before he sailed, and in Europe received the first Ph.D. to be granted by Göttingen to an American. Back home, Everett came to edit the North American Review, even while he continued to hold his Harvard students spellbound. One of them was named Ralph Waldo Emerson.

  But the greatest intellectual leader in Boston and Cambridge during this period was William Ellery Channing. A powerful intellect in behalf of Unitarianism, he had delivered an epochal sermon, “The Moral Argument against Calvinism,” roundly attacking the notion that human nature was fundamentally depraved and incapable of progress and moral improvement. Channing was sensitive to the quiet but powerful revolutionary changes at work throughout the world. Experience must not be the only guide, he warned; men must also experiment. “There are seasons in human affairs of inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes and a new and undefined good is thirsted for. These are periods when the principles of experience need to be modified, when hope and trust and instinct claim a share with prudence in the guidance of affairs, when in truth to dare is the highest wisdom.”

  So all these forces—affluent and benevolent families, religious and philosophical collegiality and conflict—produced a culture in which literary fellowship and artistic creativity could thrive. There was one other powerful, though often invisible or unnoticed force—the existence of liberty both as a means and as an end. It was because liberty existed in Massachusetts, in the form of tolerance of dissent and of constitutional and judicial protection of political and religious liberty (save occasionally for abolitionists and other militants), that teachers could teach as they wished and students could argue. But liberty was more than a means, a process. In the form of a noble individualism, of the capacity of a person for self-fulfillment, liberty was the ultimate goal, the loftiest value.

  It was because he saw in man “a great nature, the divine image, and vast capacities, that I demand for him means of self-development, spheres for free action—that I call society not to fetter, but to aid his growth,” Channing said. But he saw eminently practical ways of teaching self-improvement along with preaching: learning to write good simple. English, for example. One of his students, Oliver Wendell Holmes, would not forget:

  Channing, with his bland, superior look,

  Cold as a moonbeam on a frozen brook,

  While the pale student, shivering in his shoes,

  Sees from his theme the turgid rhetoric ooze.

  THE ENGINE IN THE VINEYARD

  On a fall day in 1835, driving his chaise on dusty roads through groves of coloring maples and birches, Ralph Waldo Emerson brought his bride of one day from her house in Plymouth to their new home in Concord. Together Waldo and Lydia Emerson—whom he renamed Lidian because it seemed more poetic—looked at the place where he would dwell for forty-seven years, she for another ten years after that. And their new neighbors looked at them—at Waldo, thin and tall, with his tomahawk nose, large, deep-seated eyes, thin curving lips—and at Lidian, not a beauty, all agreed, but refined and unaffected. He was in his thirty-third year, she in her thirty-fourth.

  Their house stood half a mile east of Concord center, at the junction of the Cambridge Turnpike and Lexington Road, along which the stages ran to Boston. On these roads sixty years earlier British troops had marched, occupying Concord center before their repulse by Revolutionary guerrillas at the North Bridge a mile to the west. A few weeks before marrying Lidian, Emerson had bought their house from John Coolidge for $3,500. Soon the couple made it their own. Sitting by a curving window in their second-floor bedroom, Lidian could see their garden, with its grape arbor, pear trees, and flower beds. On the first floor Emerson established his study, lined with hundreds of books in freestanding shelves that could be readily carried out in case of fire. Emerson worked at a round table, in front of a fireplace of black Italian marble. Sitting in his rocking chair, he could revolve the table as he filled drawers with his journals. But his greatest joy was the garden, which led down to a brook and to low meadowlands that stretched toward Walden Pond, two miles away.

  Emerson was at home in Concord. His grandfather, the Reverend William Emerson, descended from the first minister in Concord during the mid-1600s, had been a Revolutionary patriot and builder of the Old Manse near the center of town. Young Waldo, as he came to be called, had grown up in Boston, where his father—another William—had been minister of the First Church. Waldo’s childhood had been scarred by frustration and tragedy. A mediocre, unsettled student, he lived in an aspiring family that set high demands on his scholarship and piety. He loved his rambles in Boston, picking up shells beside the wharves below Summer Street and exploring the North and South ends even at the expense of encountering bellicose Irish boys guarding their precincts, and he loved even more the trips to his ancestral home, where he explored the Concord River in the summer and followed the huge plodding ox teams clearing the snows of winter.

  Life turned drear for the Emerson family when father William died and Waldo’s mother was forced into a hard, peripatetic life of moving from place to place taking in boarders. Admitted to Harvard at the age of fourteen, Waldo had to scratch out a living tutoring even younger students, waiting on table at Commons, and serving as errand boy for President Kirkland of Harvard, beneath whose study he lived for a time. His work at Harvard was scattered and irregular until he came under the influence of Channing, Ticknor & Co., who were prime forces moving him, as he said later, “from the Unconscious to the Conscious; from the sleep of the Passions to their rage.”

  Graduated, Emerson still seemed unable to find himself. He taught at boys’ and girls’ schools, with little satisfaction, and attended divinity school in Cambridge, with less. He experienced rheumatic pains, serious loss of vision, lung troubles—psychosomatic perhaps, but no less painful for that. He traveled restlessly, preached evocatively, wrote feverishly—but could not find a center to his life. When the fetching girl he married at seventeen, Ellen Tucker, died of tuberculosis within seventeen months, he felt emptied of life. He quit the Unitarian ministry. By the time he remarried, a beloved brother was already dead of “consumption,” another dying of it.

  Somehow Emerson steadied himself. After traveling in Europe and meeting his heroes Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth, he resolved to break with his life in Boston and find the center of things in Concord. In the fall of 1834, a year before he brought his new wife to Concord, he and his mother had come there to board with grandfather Ezra Ripley in the Old Manse. In a corner room overlooking the river and the embattled bridge, under a great willow tree that tossed and “trumpeted” in the storms, he set himself to pulling together ideas gleaned from his musings, his travels, his readings—above all from his immersion in Kant, Swedenborg, Goethe, Coleridge, Carlyle. “Hail to the quiet fields of my fathers!” Emerson wrote in his diary. Moving across town to his new home, with Lidian and his mother, only brought him closer to the fields stretching toward Walden Pond. The result was Nature, a short book that became the clar
ion call for the small band of transcendentalists in Concord, Cambridge, and Boston.

  Nature was, above all, a paean to Nature, the great organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual. If a man wishes not to be alone, stay not in his study but look at the stars; if a man would cast off his years, he must go to the woods, for in the woods, “we return to reason and faith.” The moral influence of nature on every person is that amount of truth that it illustrates to him. The “Supreme Being does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old.”

  A powerful secondary theme forces its way through these beatitudes—the central role and thrust of man. The power to produce the delight of fields and woods does not reside in nature, but in man, “or in a harmony of both.” The whole of nature is in fact a metaphor of the human mind. Nature’s dice are always loaded, but it also “offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful” to man. “Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man?” Man, with access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite. Emerson’s address “The Method of Nature” a few years later, panegyrized man, his talent, his genius. “O rich and various Man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain, the geometry of the City of God; in thy heart, the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong. An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen.…”